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Met Opera Brings a Little Punch to Its Puccini

High above Times Square, images of Madama Butterfly were broadcast live last night for an audience of hundreds, some in seats and some just passing by, as part of the Metropolitan Operas season-opening gala.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Bicyclists and passers-by stopped, seemingly mesmerized by the giant images of “Madama Butterfly” glaring through the night sky over Times Square. About 1,000 people sat on chairs behind metal barricades and red velvet ropes on Broadway. Neon advertisements for beer and the Internet competed with a tenor and a soprano singing out their passion.

The Metropolitan Opera embarked on a new era with a season-opening gala last night that dripped wealth and celebrity but also included an unprecedented dose of populism: a simulcast in Times Square, where the giant Panasonic, Nasdaq and Reuters screens beamed Puccini’s tale of love and abandonment north to a blocked-off section of Broadway.

“It’s $300 cheaper than getting into the Met,” said Lewanne Jones, 53, a documentary filmmaker from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I like the idea of seeing it in the middle of all this chaos. Art and advertising — which will win? The experience is so bizarre that it kind of adds to the experience.”

Back at home base, the Met also set up a screen on the Lincoln Center plaza for a simulcast. Before it all began, celebrities swept up a red carpet and were interviewed by a host as a press of photographers jostled and shouted out names, in an almost bizarre intersection of Hollywood and high art.

The opening-night performance of “Madama Butterfly,” the first new production to inaugurate a Met season in two decades, raised the curtain on the reign of Peter Gelb, the 16th general manager in the Met’s 123-year history. And the season opening was intended to make a splash.

Mr. Gelb, a former artist manager, producer and record company executive, has waded into the job with a strategy of grabbing the public’s attention for what can seem, to rational, modern minds, an odd endeavor: unamplified dramas about human passions expressed through song, often in foreign languages, to the accompaniment of a large orchestra.

He has said his goal is to attract audiences by stressing the theatrical aspect of opera and using technology to disseminate performances. The results so far have been a combination of digital-age showmanship and innovation.

Mr. Gelb has announced plans to bring in more theater directors and provide recordings via Internet downloads, installed an art gallery, staged an open house and made deals to put Met operas live in movie theaters and on satellite radio. The Met even added a countdown-to-opening-night clock on its Web site.

If Mr. Gelb wanted to insert opera into the mainstream, the Times Square simulcast did the trick. Early arrivals were greeted with a performance by Nelly Furtado, sponsored by MTV, singing her hit “Promiscuous Girl.” Advertisements at the military recruitment center touted the Army, the Navy and the Air Force as the character Pinkerton, an American naval officer, sang to Butterfly.

“I think it’s gorgeous,” Kyle Pleasant, 23, a spiky-haired actor and Seattle native, said at an intermission. “It gives New York a romantic feeling, and it adds a lot of humanity to Times Square.”

Ron Cross, 57, visiting from Sioux Rapids, Iowa, said: “We’re from the Midwest. We don’t have things like this in the Midwest.”

At Lincoln Center, where the Met said the outdoor crowd reached 3,000 people, the well-known figures who flowed down the carpet — many invited by the Met in a calculated attempt to attract attention — included Jimmy Fallon, Jude Law, Al Roker, Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi, Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts, the designer Zac Posen, with Liv Tyler in a cream dress of his design, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, David Bowie and Iman, and Donald and Melania Trump, who missed the first act.

Some in the crowd said they had come for the unique experience, including Met subscribers like Joyce Counsil, of Bridgewater, N.J., who has a ticket for “Butterfly” later in the run.

“You just have to be here,” she said. Her husband, David, added, “This is for inclusion, not exclusion.”

In the house, operagoers lined the stairways to people-watch as the swirl of gowns and glittering jewelry poured in. After the curtain calls, cast members took a bow from a balcony overlooking the plaza, and were loudly cheered. Mr. Gelb’s imprint on the Met’s stage will not be felt for some time, since much of the programming for the next several years was already in place when he took over.

But Monday night was an exception. He scrapped the usual Met practice of opening the season with a hodgepodge of star-studded acts. He imported the “Butterfly” production that the film director Anthony Minghella had prepared for the English National Opera.

Mr. Gelb is not the first Met general manager to try to shake things up. Rudolf Bing, who ruled in the 1950’s and 60’s, also brought in many theater directors.

A question mark is how Mr. Gelb will handle the Met’s finances in an era of flat ticket sales and mounting costs. Many nights the house is not full, and a large midseason gift last year helped plug what was expected to be a deficit of several million dollars.

The Met is a behemoth. It employs 1,500 full- and part-time workers and had a $225 million budget last year. This year it will mount 222 performances and 27 productions.

One board member, William D. Rollnick, acknowledged that Mr. Gelb’s plans were expensive.

“Yeah, it’s going to take money, but everything takes money,” he said. “It’s raising the bar. We’ll do it.”

Cassi Feldman and Melena Ryzik contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Live From the Met, Puccini With Extra Punch. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe